ABSTRACT
Hiroshi Fujino's Kierkegaard: The Philosophy of Standing in between the Aesthetic and the Ethical is one of the most recent studies on Kierkegaard in Japan. It is characteristic for Fujino's argumentation that he consistently locates Kierkegaard in the historical context of dialectical philosophy between the phenomenon and the idea. However, unlike Hegel, the synthesis for Kierkegaard is not inherent in the dialectic, but realizable only by a leap of faith. Therefore, he seeks to bring about the extreme breakdown of reason through the dialectic for this leap. From this point of view, Fujino emphasizes that Kierkegaard saw a problem with the tendency of nineteenth-century Danish Christendom to connect the aesthetic, contemplative, and metaphysical self-forgetfulness with religion. Fujino's project to discuss Kierkegaard in context offers relevant hints as to some points which have not yet been given enough consideration in previous Kierkegaard research in Japan.
